Up to August, 1914, the total of Zeppelin airships built numbered twenty-five, while since the war the two great works at Friedrichshafen and Staaken have produced between seventy-five and eighty. As the mean period for the building of a Zeppelin is known with certainty to be two months, there must always have been four new airships on the stocks at the same time.
Most of the Zeppelins launched into the air before the war came to grief, thus leaving in the service of the German Army and Navy a fleet of less than a dozen when fighting began. Since then nearly all the dirigibles, old and new, have been handed over to the German Navy, which has used them for many kinds of work, such as bombing expeditions, protection of mine layers and small torpedo boats at sea, chasing submarines, searching for mine fields, and, last and most important, reconnoitring for the High Seas Fleet.
Disaster has attended the flight of an overwhelming majority of these air monsters, no fewer than thirty of which are known to have been destroyed in one way or another, as is shown by the following list:
L-1—Destroyed just before the war, when it fell in the North Sea near Heligoland.
L-2—Burned at Buhlsbuettel just before the war.
L-3—Descended at Famoe in Denmark at beginning of the war, and was burned by its crew.
L-4—Descended at Blaavands Huk, Denmark, at beginning of the war, and was burned by its crew.
L-5—Brought down on the Belgian front in 1915; part of crew saved.
L-6—Burned at Buhlsbuettel in its hangar in September, 1916.
L-7—Brought down by British destroyers off Portland, crew being drowned, in 1915.